Food vs Drug

Not formally tested, but uses ingredients believed to be safe from thousands of years of use.

Very carefully tested.

Eaten by everyone, young and old, healthy and sick.

Only eaten by people with very specific diseases or conditions.

A food should have no negative side effects, other than making you fat if you eat too much of it. There
is no pressing need to eat any particular food.

If a cancer drug makes your hair fall out and makes you nauseous, even this can be tolerated so long as
it cures the cancer.

Consider Proctor & Gamble introducing transfat (brand name Crisco). Consider Monsanto introducing
genetically modified foods where genes from various species and artificial genes are mixed to form new foods.
Consider DuPont’s fluoride. Consider food irradiation. These foods should be treated more like drugs
because:

They have not yet been tested by time the way ordinary foods are.

The consequences are much larger than for drugs since the entire population may ingest large quantities.

Besides testing, we need labeling both so that people can opt out of the experimental foods and so that people
can track the negative side effects. If people are denied the knowledge they are eating these experimental foods,
they will not consider those foods as a possible cause of some symptom. Their doctor cannot consider them
either.

The creators of these foods strenuously and successfully resist even allowing competitors to label their foods
as being free of these new ingredients. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, willing slave of the food
manufacturers, and willing acceptor of contributions, enacted laws to keep consumers in
the dark about what they are eating. There is no advantage to the consumer of doing that.